Fifty inspiring ideas for places (Part one)

The place where you live belongs to you, and it’s up to you to shape it. That’s been a thread through thirteen years of work, during which Revolutionary Arts have held street parties and declared the end of Worthing pier an independent state, hijacked pedestrian precincts and refilled empty shops, borrowed churches for exhibitions and snuck contemporary art into old museums.

All of this comes from that one starting point – it’s up to you to make a difference. Here are fifty inspiring projects (some ours, some we’ve visited, some we just love in the Revolutionary Arts office) that can inspire you to bring playfulness, pride, pop up fun, placeshaking and productivity to the place where you live.

1. Open a pop up bookshop
2. Make some robots
3. Plant more sunflowers
4. Start a shop local campaign
5. Walk to work
6. Create an indoor charity market
7. Open a cycle-powered cinema
8. Ask people what they want in the neighbourhood
9. Make your own roadsigns to encourage people to walk
10. Start a weekend festival in a forgotten corner of the town
11. Manage the empty shops to make it easier for people to use them
12. Make the public spaces places for people to sit
13. Turn the place you live into a Play Street
14. Create a Cash Mob and support independent shops
15. Print your own money
16. Grow more food
17. Fill the shops with swings
18. Plant a sensory garden
19. Think of the bicycle as transport, not just a leisure activity
    
20. Install benches with bookshelves at bus stops
21. Open a pop up playspace
22. Design theatre posters and paste them up
23. Find new uses for empty shops
24. Only buy secondhand stuff
25. Start a bicycle recycling project
26. Tell people what’s made locally
27. Collect photographs of things you’d usually ignore
28. Make your street a 10 smiles an hour zone
29. Give teenagers their own market
30. Open a café that gives homeless people jobs
31. Ride your bike naked
32. Open a box shop
33. Find the garden under the paving slabs
34. Build your own mobile phone network
35. Imagine what an art festival could do
36. Meet up to celebrate local architecture
37. Create interactive art in windows with digital technology
38. Open a book exchange in a fridge
39. Ensure that people can walk (not drive) to the town centre
40. Clean up the place where you live
41. Make buildings from shipping containers
42. Open a pop up crazy golf course in a shopping centre
43. Make the whole town an arts venue
44. Turn the local park into a city farm
45. Paint your own pedestrian crossings on streets
46. Start a moveable museum
47. Bring bees to the city
48. Find out what makes a place special
49. Make sure your high street balances
50. Create a pop up thinktank and write your own list of ideas for making where you live better

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